6. “Mama tried”

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin
Keyword(s):  
Country Music ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Merle Haggard

While the Nashville sound dominated much of country radio in the 1960s and countrypolitan turbocharged its pop leanings in the 1970s, other styles of country music were still being played that would ultimately help bring a revival of “traditional” country sounds back to the charts. “Mama tried” describes the new amalgam of rockabilly, honky-tonk, and Western swing that was developed by artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens in the mid-1960s, along with the outlaw movement in Nashville, the members of which rebelled against the major labels’ limitations and returned to country’s roots. Other artists who formed their own unique sounds included Johnny Cash.

Capital Bluegrass

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kip Lornell
Keyword(s):  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Radio Station ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Public Radio ◽  
The Public ◽  
Slow Decline ◽  
General Recognition ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Bluegrass Music

This book documents the history and development of bluegrass music in and around Washington, DC. It begins with the pre-bluegrass period of country music and ends with a description of the local scene near the end of the 2010s. Capital Bluegrass details the period when this genre became recognized locally as a separate genre within country music, which occurred shortly after the Country Gentlemen formed in 1957. This music gained a wider audience during the 1960s, when WAMU-FM began broadcasting this music and the nationally recognized magazine Bluegrass Unlimited was launched in suburban Maryland. Bluegrass flourished during the 1980s with dozens of local venues offering live bluegrass weekly and the public radio station featuring forty hours a week of bluegrass programming. Although it remains a notable genre in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, by the 1990s bluegrass began its slow decline in popularity. By 2019, the local bluegrass community remains stable, though graying. Despite the creation of both bluegrasscountry.org and the DC Bluegrass Union, it is abundantly clear that general recognition and appreciation for bluegrass locally is well below the heights it reached some thirty-five years earlier.

Soldiers’ Song

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Country Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
War Films ◽  
Soul Music ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Racial Mix

The use of popular music in post-Vietnam Hollywood war films has varied depending on the war being depicted. Swing, the popular music of World War II, goes almost entirely unrepresented in films depicting that war. Films about Vietnam have exploited the rich resource of popular music from the 1960s to characterize significant racial and class differences among American soldiers, typically pitting black Motown and soul music against white country music. Draft scripts for Apocalypse Now reveal how that film might have used late 1960s rock to emphasize the pathological nature of the American effort in Vietnam. Popular music in films about the all-volunteer, post-hip hop military suggest that racial tensions have abated, with a racial mix of soldiers enjoying a variety of musics. Films about twenty-first-century soldiers have almost no popular music, eliding well-documented practices of contemporary soldiers and denying civilian audiences potential points of connection by way of popular culture.

“The Way I Would Feel About San Quentin”: Johnny Cash & the Politics of Country Music

Daedalus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 142 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Geary
Keyword(s):  
Country Music ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
The Law ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Way

Johnny Cash's live prison albums, “At Folsom Prison” and “At San Quentin,” are significant and under-recognized social statements of the 1960s. Cash encouraged his listeners to empathize with prisoners by performing songs with prison themes and by recording the electric reactions of inmates to his music. Cash performed before a multiracial audience, and his music was popular with the counterculture as well as with traditional country fans. Cash's albums and his prison reform activism rejected the law-and-order policies of conservative politicians who sought to enlist country music in their cause. An examination of Cash's prison records challenges the commonly held notion that country music provided the soundtrack for the white conservative backlash of the late 1960s.

Workin’ Man Blues

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-66
Author(s):  
George Case
Keyword(s):  
Country Music ◽  
Center Of Gravity ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Merle Haggard ◽  
Roll Back

While musicians such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent took rock ‘n’ roll back to the masses, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Merle Haggard, were transforming the genre of country music, making the medium more original and more relevant as America’s cultural center of gravity was shifting south and west. Country now expressed its own forms of rebellion, against both the strictures of its industry and the condescension of outsiders. As country became a little bit cooler, it was inevitable that cool rock ‘n’ roll in turn would become a little bit country.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-198
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Country Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Vocal Expressions ◽  
Lasting Influence ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The conclusion considers the ways in which female country artists of the 1960s and 1970s and more contemporary artists have drawn on the performative and singing practices of women in early country music. Specifically, it examines Loretta Lynn’s inclusion of the musical tropes and vocal expressions of honky-tonk and how Dolly Parton has combined past theatrical conventions with contrasting vocal approaches in her fluid play of gender. The Dixie Chicks, Gretchen Wilson, and Miranda Lambert have also carried the recurrent themes of the past to the dynamic present in their performances of the singing cowgirl, the redneck woman, and the crazy ex-girlfriend. The conclusion argues that the stylized displays of rusticity, working-class womanhood, confrontational narratives, and vocalities redolent of past traditions have all had a lasting influence on recent female artists.

Louisiana Country Blues: A Comparison with the Delta Country Style of Charley Patton and Followers: Mutual Influences

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
John Broven
Keyword(s):  
Mississippi Delta ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
As If

This chapter compares Louisiana country music with the Mississippi Delta country style of Charley Patton. The influence of the Mississippi Delta blues can be found in Louisiana through artists such as Robert Pete Williams and other rural performers. As if to emphasize the fragmented nature of the Louisiana blues scene, Williams did not start to assert himself until the blues revival years of the 1960s. Like Patton and Blind Lemon, he did have an individualistic style, as can be heard on his classic recording of “Prisoner's Talking Blues.” Williams was an intensely personal artist, an introvert lost in his own music. He was not the sort of man to influence young contemporaries, as Patton did in Mississippi. Indeed, it seems that there was no reciprocal influence from Louisiana to Mississippi.

‘Phases and stages, circles and cycles’: Willie Nelson and the concept album

Popular Music ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Compositional Approach ◽  
Concept Album ◽  
Recording Artist ◽  
Music Community ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musical Forms

AbstractWhile many rock artists explored the compositional possibilities of the concept album in the 1960s and 1970s, Nashville's country music community largely ignored the format. But a few artists working on the fringes of country music – and who, notably, aligned themselves with the countercultural images and attitudes of the time – did begin to experiment with the format in the first years of the 1970s. Chief among them was country songwriter and recording artist Willie Nelson who, by the dawn of the 1970s, was on the verge of breaking away from Music Row to seek more lucrative opportunities in Texas. This article explores the role that Nelson's experimentation with the concept album played in his efforts to adopt a countercultural image, develop a younger audience and challenge the hegemony of the country music industry. Moreover, close examination of Nelson's compositional approach to three albums – Yesterday's Wine (1971), Phases and Stages (1974) and Red Headed Stranger (1975) – reveals that Nelson consciously blended the singles-based approach to songwriting that predominated in 1960s and 1970s Nashville and the extended narrative and musical forms of contemporaneous rock music to create musical products that suited the needs of country radio and rock fans alike.

scholarly journals Sing Me Back Home

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-111
Author(s):  
Jesse Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
White House ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Leftist Group ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Southern Migrants

This paper examines the role of country music in the political life of the Young Patriots, a radical leftist group composed of white southern migrants to Chicago that allied with the Black Panther Party during the 1960s and 1970s. It begins by taking up scholarly accounts of the Republican Party's strategic embrace of country music during the era before examining the ways in which the Young Patriots used country music as a tool to organize in their local community. It argues that by grounding their analysis of country in the political economy of their neighborhood of Uptown Chicago, and institutions particular to migrant enclaves—especially the urban “hillbilly bar”—the Young Patriots offered an interpretation of country's politics that runs counter to the racialized business logic that governed Music Row and White House as well as more contemporary narratives about country music's essential political intransigence. Finally, it offers provisional thoughts on how this case study illustrates a fundamental challenge for political progressives invested in country music: how to organize the complexity of a genre whose politics were—like the politics of the working-class—often divided against itself and expressed in deeply contradictory ways with regards to central political issues like race, gender, and the nation, and what it means to put those organized politics to work.

scholarly journals The country and Irish problem

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 568-584
Author(s):  
Stan Erraught
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Country Music ◽  
List Type ◽  
Type Number ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
National Characteristics ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractCountry music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1)Country music did not simply arise ‘naturally’ in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such.(2)Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience.(3)In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.

Bob Dylan in the Country

2020 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Timothy Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Country Music ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private World ◽  
Bob Dylan ◽  
Public World ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

At the close of the 1960s two developments changed the shape of mainstream rock and roll music. The first was a new focus, on the part of a number of influential artists, on music about domestic life—kids, spouses, home. The second was a new interest in blending rock rhythms with instrumentation and themes taken from country music. This essay explores the ways in which these two concerns overlap in the work of Bob Dylan. I argue that Dylan’s work at the turn of the decade offers insights into our own current moment, when the relationship between the public world and the private world is being renegotiated. I show how Dylan’s “country” songs are, in fact, models of self-conscious experimentation that push against the conventions of popular song and highlight the conditions of their own production.

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